Helping Visa bring football home

20th July 2018

The English dream may now be over for another 4 years at least but for a few glorious weeks England was in the full grips of World Cup fever.

Visa UK, as an official sponsor of the 2018 FIFA World CupTM wanted to capitalise on the growing national pride and associate Visa with the 2018 FIFA World CupTM with a younger demographic.

The original brief was to capitalise on the national pride felt after the last minute victory over Tunisia by creating a Snapchat filter for the England v Panama game. However, it grew and evolved in to a brief to help Visa UK join the optimism and conversation happening around the tournament.

England v Panama

Confident of victory (after all when have England ever let us down) we created 3 filters for the day:

Pre-game filter that ran from 00:01 to 12:59 on game day

The filters struck a chord with users gaining an average share rate of 4.76% (slightly over the overall Snapchat average of 3-4%) however the before game filter achieved a share rate of 5.18% and the during game filter achieved a share rate of 9.85% which is huge compared to the benchmark.

The success of the filter meant that the decision was taken to run the filter again. As England had now qualified the decision was taken to run the filter during the round of 16 game against Columbia.

England v Colombia

Building on the learnings of the first filter the build up and in game filters were adapted and ran again for the England v Colombia game when they were picked up and used by Snapchat influencer Stevo the Madman and gained an overall share rate of 6.19%.

England v Sweden

By the England v Sweden game the country was struck down by full football fever. The creative was therefore updated to reflect the optimism and hysteria of the nation with a football’s coming home creative. The filter surpassed even the impressive results of the peak in game Panama filter (9.85%) and delivered an astonishing share rate of 15.77% as well as a very high number of saves (12.4k). The results were probably helped by the ease by which England won this game allowing people to engage on social more.

England v Croatia

The “It’s coming home” filter ran again and delivered another high share rate of 11.42%. Unfortunately England’s journey ended here but the unexpected success of the team allowed Visa to engage with a newer audience around their 2018 FIFA World CupTM sponsorship.